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4.5 Stars

Through the eyes and ears and thoughts of these two families –one black, one white �� with a total of six people, we get a small glimpse of life in the post-war 1930’s and 40’s living in the Mississippi Delta region. Life on a cotton farm with its never-ending physical demands. All the mud.

From Laura we hear her thoughts a total of twelve times throughout this story. From Jamie, seven times, from Ronsel, five times, from Henry, four times. From Hap and Florence, four times each. You might think that makes this primarily Laura’s story, but it is a shared story of all those in both families, how they arrived at the places they did, and how the era and the people, including the townspeople, own a piece of this story, as does the land �� the mud. It is as much a part of this story as any character.

”But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that.��

Laura wasn’t raised to this life, the life of a farmer’s wife. When she first meets Henry, it is the spring of 1939, and she is thirty-one “a spinster well on my way to petrification,�� an English teacher for a private school for boys, living in her parents�� home, where she grew up in Memphis.

They have a very proper courtship, Henry is an educated man, who grew up on a farm, but has a job as a successful engineer. She begins to have a small degree of hope.

Eventually Laura meets his brother, Jamie, time passes, and eventually Henry and Laura marry. It isn’t long before she finds herself living on a farm, which is more of a farm-to-be, mostly mud when she first sees it. It goes from bad to worse, and it’s a while before things begin to go from worse to better, and even then, there’s Henry’s father, Pappy, who represents the worst of the Jim Crow South in this small town in the middle of Mississippi.

”When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband’s fingernails and encrusting the children’s knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of the house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.

“When it rained, as it often did, the yard turned into a thick gumbo, with the house floating in it like a soggy cracker. When the rains came hard, the river rose and swallowed the bridge that was the only way across. The world was on the other side of that bridge, the world of light bulbs and paved roads and shirts that stayed white. When the river rose, the world was lost to us and we to it.��

Racism, which is always present to some degree, really begins to rear its ugly head when Jamie comes to the farm, returning from WWII, around the same time that Ronsel, the son of the black sharecropper family that farm part of their land returns, as well. While Jamie has no problem befriending Ronsel, the townspeople have an issue with it. As time passes, these two families never foresaw the toll this would take, the repercussions for either family.

This story pulled me back and forth through time, and through the thoughts of these various characters. A beautifully written, often heartbreaking, spellbinding and horrifying story, this still was a book that was hard for me to put down.

�� What we can’t speak, we say in silence.��



Many thanks, once again, to the Public Library system, and the many Librarians that manage, organize and keep it running, for the loan of this book!